Map Quest

As a nervous little boy, I liked maps. With their longitudes crossing latitudes at precise ninety-degree angles, with the topographical yellows of the African veldt and the pale caviar grays of the Caspian Sea, maps returned to my asthmatic lungs small, necessary gusts of breath; they helped make sense of the world spinning relentlessly beneath our feet as we emigrated from one superpower to the other. A worn Soviet atlas accompanied me on the plane out of Leningrad through East Berlin, Vienna, and Rome, all the way to Queens. The customs area at Vienna’s airport was a madhouse of Russian immigrants collecting their worldly possessions. Most of ours filled two enormous Army-green sacks, one of which happened to burst in transit, spilling a hundred kilograms of red compasses with yellow hammer-and-sickles that we were going to sell to Communist Italians. As my parents crawled on all fours to gather their wares, I subdued my sweaty worry by carefully tracing the frosty expanses of Greenland in my atlas—cold, cold, cold—rocking back and forth like a religious Jew. A middle-aged Austrian woman in a mink coat, who saw me davening over my maps, was the first Western person I ever encountered. She elegantly stepped over my parents and handed me a Mozart chocolate. She smiled at me with eyes the color of Lake Neusiedl, the largest in Austria, according to my map of Central Europe.

In Queens, my father looked at the Grand Central Parkway from an overpass—all those cars!—and thought that he could never drive a car through so much traffic without crashing (he was correct). Five of us lived near busy Union Turnpike, in Kew Gardens, in a one-bedroom apartment: me, my parents, my grandmother, and my step-grandfather, who, it is not easy for me to say, was not a good man. There were family fights that I can now perceive only as colors—a searing yellow-green across my vision whenever I see an elderly bald man clench his fists. The Army cot that was my bed had been donated by two young neighborhood Jews, Michael and Zev, whose kindness made them seem like a second incarnation of the woman in the Vienna airport. We collected a sofa and a mattress from a nearby garbage dump. I had spent little time with children in Russia, because my asthma kept me at home. I had no social skills, only the worlds of family and books, so at Hebrew school in Queens I sat at a separate lunch table and talked to myself in Russian as the children laughed and made cuckoo signs at me. I began losing things. I would come home and say to my mother, “Mamatchka, don’t be sad. If I lost the glue today, I won’t be able to lose it tomorrow.”

But there were two things I would never lose: my Soviet atlas and a toy Eastern Airlines plane my mother had bought on Fourteenth Street, the boulevard of discount dreams, in faraway Manhattan. Using my atlas, I plotted out the flight time to Rome, then to Vienna, then to East Berlin, then back to Leningrad. I would launch my plane down the runway of our cluttered apartment, and then sit there with the plane in my hand for the eight and a half hours it took to get to Rome, humming to myself the sounds of the jet engine: “Zhhhh . . . mmmm . . . zhhhh . . . mmmm . . .” Finally, I would land the plane on the green Army cot (also known as Leonardo da Vinci Airport), and the next day resume the journey to Leningrad.

It was essential that my plastic plane never touch the floor until it was time to land, or all the passengers, my whole family, would die. When my asthma got the best of me and I could no longer zhhhh and mmmm, I would tie the plane to a string hanging from the cot, so that it was technically still in the air, then sit and watch it like an obedient dog, while family life took off and crashed all around me.

My travels became more complex. I would go through Paris, Amsterdam, Helsinki, then to Leningrad. Anchorage, Tokyo, and Vladivostok beckoned as well. I became an expert in flight times and the names of important world cities.

My mother had been a piano teacher in Russia and my father used to sing opera. They were invited by the local synagogue to give a concert. Papa sang the expected Chaliapin ditty “Otchi Tchornyia” (“Dark Eyes”), and the Yiddish standard “Ofyn Pripetchek” (“Learn, children, don’t be afraid / Every beginning is hard”). I was presented as the final act—the seven-year-old refugee who could name any world capital! I answered four right, but flubbed the last: Chad. Cosmopolitan as my travels had been, I had never flown my plastic Eastern Airlines jet to N’Djamena. Despite my humiliation, we were given two hundred and fifty dollars by the congregation for our performance, which we turned into a size-2 Harvé Benard business suit. My tiny mother filled it just in time for her first successful clerk-typist job interview. The fastest way to fly to N’Djamena, Chad, is through Air France’s hub in Paris. Under optimal conditions, it can be done in sixteen hours and thirty-five minutes. I am flying there still. ♦